AMD claims 'world's fastest GPU' title

AMD has unveiled its first graphics card based on its Graphics Core Next architecture, which The Regtold you about in excruciating detail this summer. According to AMD, the card – the Radeon HD 7970 – is also the only GPU to be built using a 28-nanometer process.

AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture is a from-the-bottom-up rethinking of GPU design, abandoning the time-honored very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture and replacing it with "compute units" (CUs) that are essentially vector cores containing multiple single-instruction-stream, multiple-data-stream (SIMD) structures, programmed in a per-lane basis.

What that stack of acronyms adds up to – in theory, at least, since we haven't yet got our hands on a GCN-based GPU – is a chip that not only provides a hefty dose of graphics power, but also lends itself to the CPU-cum-GPU cooperative processing known as "heterogeneous computing", in which chunks of tasks are assigned to compute or graphics cores depending upon which can handle them most efficiently.

With the introduction of the HD 7970, AMD also rolled out a new metric – at least new to you humble Reg reporter – saying that the 28nm part provides "an improvement of over 150 per cent in performance/sq mm over the prior generation."

The HD 7970 also support an assortment of AMD-branded enhancements, including: